And It Spread

"And it spread into my soul" should be "And it spread into my songs"

So beautiful and meaningful... Especially that last verse.

"Then you came back from space With a brand new laugh and a different face You took my hand and held it up And shot my arm full of love."

Love this song. I love their voices so much.

"Shot my arm full of love" sounds like heroin to me.

The song is about love. Throughout the song, a metaphor of the sun is used to represent love (e.g. "light in the room", "coming back from space", cold when absent, warm when present). Lack of love leeds to bitterness and coldness that spreads to take over everything in your life--into your heart, and even into the words of the songs you write.

Then when love is found again (with another reference to the sun coming back from space), the new feelings spread in a similar way to positively affect everything in your world.

It just occurred to me that he could be talking about a different person in the first verse and the last. Like, "you" refers to the object of his affections, rather than one particular individual.

If "you" has "a brand new laugh and a different face," that suggests a new, or at least radically changed, person. I like that better too, so I'm gonna roll with it.

I think it's about the narrator breaking up with the girl he loves, going through the dark and lonely times afterwards, and then finding someone new "with a brand new laugh and a different face".

When I first heard this I thought it was about someone becoming depressed and turning to drugs after his lover leaves him. Not saying this is right but just sorting through some thoughts here!

In this interpretation, the first couple verses are straight-forward, his lover leaves and he's sad. The song crescendos in the middle after he says the thought of hurting himself has crept in, to the point where Seth essentially screams the line about the truth and lies. I think these lines are emphasized in volume and pacing for a reason.

Then after the manic excitement of the middle of the song we're left with this quiet void, where someone unfamiliar appears but the speaker assigns this person the identity of his lover. They shoot his arm full of love. Another crescendo and more exuberant screaming, and the speaker notes, once again, that he can't distinguish between truth and lies. The lie is the final verse. The person he sees could be a drug dealer, or a new lover giving him drugs, or a hallucination that he can tell doesn't quite match up with the person he loved, or maybe he's gone off the rails and it's a doctor giving him medication.

Or maybe the character in the song is singing about drugs the whole time! He tries to kick the habit and he can't live with it, then he turns to different drugs at the end.

I think of this as the co-dependency song. He is addicted to love, not the particular person. I don't think when she comes back that it is the same person, it's just another person who is filling the void, and that is what he is addicted to. "And shot my arm full of love."